Google's Cloud Launches at I/O 2014

Google spent a good amount of time today at I/O announcing improvements to things like its web-based office suite, but truly attendees and web-watchers were most interested in the gadgets. The company seems to be coming to a conundrum. Android is by far Google's most popular byproduct, so those watching the keynote were most waiting to hear about Android-powered gadgets. But, this represents a problem for the company. As Microsoft is more intent on moving forward to be known as a Cloud-centric company, Android and devices seems to be drowning out Google's Cloud efforts.

However, the company did spend a good amount of time on its Cloud prospects and these shouldn't be overlooked.

Here's what Google announced today:

Cloud Debugger, a new tool to help you debug your applications in production with minimal performance overhead. Cloud Debugger gives you a full stack trace and snapshots of all local variables for any watchpoints that you set in your code with no performance impact.

Cloud Trace, to get deep insights into the performance of your cloud application. It helps you visualize and understand the time spent by your application for request processing and you can compare performance between various releases of your application, see latency distributions and easily correlate application changes to performance changes.

Google Cloud Monitoring powered by Stackdriver, designed to help you identify and address unusual behavior across your application stack. Cloud Monitoring’s rich dashboards and powerful alerting tools give you the visibility that you need. Cloud Monitoring is aware of popular open source applications and will automatically generate dashboards and alerting tuned for them.

Google Cloud Save, the new version enables your Android applications to synchronize data between devices with push notifications with no server code required.

Cloud Dataflow, a fully managed service for data processing. Based on years of internal research and development, Cloud Dataflow allows for easy and efficient data pipelines, which can execute either in batch or streaming mode with automatic optimizations.

If you think some of these look very similar to Microsoft offerings, you wouldn't be wrong. In fact, it seems we've reached a point in industry competition where it's more about playing stalemate instead of leapfrog. Many blasted Microsoft (and still do) for the Windows 8 modern UI, but apparently, Google likes it. Here's what Android L looks like: